Celebration of Cheating in Algerian Schools

I recently administered an examination that has caused me significant distress, due to the widespread cheating that occurred on the day of the exam. This situation has made it impossible for me to assess students objectively and fairly, as genuinely strong and diligent students were effectively drowned out by those who resorted to dishonest practices—who, regrettably, constitute the majority.

Thus, the claim by some/many that no one cheated is simply false. In fact, virtually everyone cheated. And please, do not ask me for proof; I am not a policeman, and we are not in a prison. What occurred was not only cheating, but also the celebration of that cheating, and for some, even lying to oneself about it.

Students were given every possible form of support: multiple-choice questions, a format already favorable to success—whether through genuine understanding or sheer luck; despite the fact that physics is fundamentally about problem-solving, yet most chose cheating.

To those who assert that they did not cheat, I challenge anyone to answer—independently and without assistance—Question 40, for example, or to come forward and solve the questions directly. It is simply not credible that students who were absent throughout the semester could suddenly obtain perfect scores (20/20), not in isolated cases, but in large numbers. 

In fact, I do not even know most of these students, as they did not attend throughout the semester; I only met them on the day of the examinations. Yet these same students obtained full grades—clearly by means of ChatGPT, although I do not know how they managed to achieve this ingenious feat—in cheating, of course, not in physics, which they obviously cannot do.  

They embody the widespread and fundamentally misguided idea that ChatGPT can be used, without any ethical conflict or moral qualms, not to honestly enhance one’s capabilities, but to enhance one’s capacity for dishonesty.

In addition, there is clear evidence of collaborative cheating, with some students sitting together and working collectively during the exam, as indicated by their identical grades, despite the fact that they never attended classes either.

To prevent a recurrence of this situation, I propose the following measures:

1. Oral examinations as an integral and systematic component of assessment.

2. A return to derivation-based exams, where the final numerical answer is secondary to the reasoning, methodology, and intermediate steps.

3. Open-book and AI-permitted exams (including the use of ChatGPT), combined with significantly more demanding questions, where genuine understanding, interpretation, and physical insight are essential and cannot be replaced by algorithmic output.